Representing Pasts – Visioning Futures

Abstract

This paper aims to show how early 20th-century films could enhance our general understanding of architecture and urban landscape. Particularly, it explores early film recordings of Belfast which was a major commercial and engineering centre at the time. As a large-scale industrial city mostly concentrating on linen production and shipbuilding, Belfast was filmed by various filmmakers including the Lumiere brothers. These films demonstrate how the city centre was a vivid public space accommodating commercial and social activities, vehicles, and crowds. Besides these activities, early moving images also reveal stages of Belfast’s expansion and densification. Industrial and housing areas were developed side by side without any distinctive zones in that period. Manufacturing facilities were ordinary components of daily life. In that matter, film is a convenient medium to observe both the physical and intangible qualities of the historical urban environment. Different from other forms of representations, it exposes how people of the time used public space and buildings, how their daily life looked like in the city, and how they interacted with the built environment. The study will also locate film settings in a geographical base to unveil the interaction between different layers of Belfast. This mapping stratified with historical drawings will provide a basis for understanding the general urban texture of the time. By doing so, the paper seeks to introduce film as an urban archive that allows a multidimensional reading of cities.